Too many elephants in too many rooms

The paragraphs below have been borrowed from friend Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed blog and are posted without further comment.

“Lucy Kellaway’s latest, about clichés and lazy writing in the business world, got me thinking about the vacuous and over-used expression “elephant in the room”. As Ms Kellaway points out, said elephant has violated zoning rules of late, showing up in pretty much every meeting everywhere in the world.

“In the last year there has scarcely been a meeting room anywhere in which an elephant has not pitched up at some point. In leading newspapers and journals alone, last year 3,700 elephants were reported as being in rooms, while in 2000 the number was only 175. If one had to sum up 2009 in one sentence, it was the year in which elephants bred like rabbits.

“Here is a Google News archive search for the expression, proving her point – too many damn elephants in too many rooms in recent years.”